MIT AI Risk Repository
Browse AI risks
594 risk entries extracted from 74 frameworks, coded by domain, subdomain, causal entity, intent and timing. Filter, then export the current selection with its licence and citation attached.
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"Generative AI models might be used with the sole intention of harming people."
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67.03.00 · Risk Category
"Frontier AI may help bad actors to perform cyberattacks, run disinformation campaigns and design biological or chemical weapons. Frontier AI will almost certainly continue to lower the barriers to entry for less sophisticated threat actors.192 We focus here on only a few important misuse risks, but this is not to downplay the importance of others."
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"Directly harmful objective"
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72.01.00 · Risk Category
"Risks arising from intentional exploitation of AI model capabilities by malicious actors to cause harm to individuals, organisations, or society."
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"Like all technologies, LLMs have the possibility for misuse by malicious actors. Malicious use of dual- use capabilities of AI is a recurring concern within literature (Brundage et al., 2018; Hendrycks et al., 2023; Mozes et al., 2023)"
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06.09.00 · Risk Category
"The 2016 scandal involving Cambridge Analytica is the most infamous example where people's data was crawled from Facebook and analytics were then provided to target these people with manipulative content for political purposes.While it may not have been AI per se, it is based on similar data and it is easy to see how AI would make this more effective"
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"Although we have discussed a number of common risks posed by ML systems, we acknowledge that there are many other ethical risks such as the potential for psychological manipulation, dehumanization, and exploitation of humans at scale."
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16.04.01 · Risk Sub-Category
Making disinformation cheaper and more effective
"While some predict that it will remain cheaper to hire humans to generate disinformation [180], it is equally possible that LM- assisted content generation may offer a lower-cost way of creating disinformation at scale."
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Anticipated risk: "Mass surveillance previously required millions of human analysts [83], but is increasingly being automated using machine learning tools [7, 168]. The collection and analysis of large amounts of information about people creates concerns about privacy rights and democratic values [41, 173,187]. Conceivably, LMs could be applied to reduce the cost and increase the efficacy of mass surveillance, thereby amplifying the capabilities of actors who conduct mass surveillance, including for illegitimate censorship or to cause other harm."
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"LMs can be used to create synthetic media and ‘fake news’, and may reduce the cost of producing disinformation at scale (Buchanan et al., 2021). While some predict that it will be cheaper to hire humans to generate disinformation (Tamkin et al., 2021), it is possible that LM-assisted content generation may offer a cheaper way of generating diffuse disinformation at scale."
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"The collection of large amounts of information about people for the purpose of mass surveillance has raised ethical and social concerns, including risk of censorship and of undermining public discourse (Cyphers and Gebhart, 2019; Stahl, 2016; Véliz, 2019). Sifting through these large datasets previously required millions of human analysts (Hunt and Xu, 2013), but is increasingly being automated using AI (Andersen, 2020; Shahbaz and Funk, 2019)."
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"Facilitating large-scale disinformation campaigns and targeted manipulation of public opinion"
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"Facilitating slander, defamation, or false accusations"
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19.02.02 · Risk Sub-Category
Informational and Communicational AI Risks
Disinformation and computational propaganda
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"Privacy and safety deals with the challenge of protecting the human right for privacy and the necessary steps to secure individual data from unauthorized external access. Many organizations employ AI technology to gather data without any notice or consent from affected citizens (Coles, 2018)."
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"Phishing is a type of cybersecurity attack wherein attackers pose as trustworthy entities to extract sensitive information from unsuspecting victims or lure them to take a set of actions. Advanced AI systems can potentially be exploited by these attackers to make their phishing attempts significantly more effective and harder to detect. In particular, attackers may leverage the ability of advanced AI assistants to learn patterns in regular communications to craft highly convincing and personalized phishing emails, effectively imitating legitimate communications from trusted entities. This tec
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"While harmful content like child sexual abuse material, fraud, and disinformation are not new challenges for governments and developers, without the proper safety and security mechanisms, advanced AI assistants may allow threat actors to create harmful content more quickly, accurately, and with a longer reach. In particular, concerns arise in relation to the following areas: - Multimodal content quality: Driven by frontier models, advanced AI assistants can automatically generate much higher-quality, human-looking text, images, audio, and video than prior AI applications. Currently, creating
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24.03.12 · Risk Sub-Category
Authoritarian Surveillance, Censorship, and Use (General)
"While new technologies like advanced AI assistants can aid in the production and dissemination of decision-guiding information, they can also enable and exacerbate threats to production and dissemination of reliable information and, without the proper mitigations, can be powerful targeting tools for oppression and control. Increasingly capable general-purpose AI assistants combined with our digital dependence in all walks of life increase the risk of authoritarian surveillance and censorship. In parallel, new sensors have flooded the modern world. The internet of things, phones, cars, homes,
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24.03.13 · Risk Sub-Category
Authoritarian Surveillance, Censorship, and Use: Authoritarian Surveillance and Targeting of Citizens
"Authoritarian governments could misuse AI to improve the efficacy of repressive domestic surveillance campaigns. Malicious actors will recognize the power of AI targeting tools. AI-powered analytics have transformed the relationship between companies and consumers, and they are now doing the same for governments and individuals. The broad circulation of personal data drives commercial innovation, but it also creates vulnerabilities and the risk of misuse. For example, AI assistants can be used to identify and target individuals for surveillance or harassment. They may also be used to manipula
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"Finally, AI assistants themselves could become weaponised by malicious actors to sow misinformation and manipulate public opinion at scale. Studies show that spreaders of disinformation tend to privilege quantity over quality of messaging, flooding online spaces repeatedly with misleading content to sow ‘seeds of doubt’ (Hassoun et al., 2023). Research on the ‘continued influence effect’ also shows that repeatedly being exposed to false information is more likely to influence someone’s thoughts than a single exposure. Studies show, for example, that repeated exposure to false information make
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"AI assistants may facilitate large-scale disinformation campaigns by offering novel, covert ways for propagandists to manipulate public opinion. This could undermine the democratic process by distorting public opinion and, in the worst case, increasing skepticism and political violence."
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AI employed to produce convincing counterfeit visuals, videos, and audio clips that give the impression of authenticity
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LLMs can be leveraged, by malicious users, to proactively generate propaganda information that can facilitate the spreading of a target
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31.01.00 · Risk Category
"generative AI tools can and will be used to propagate content that is false, misleading, biased, inflammatory, or dangerous. As generative AI tools grow more sophisticated, it will be quicker, cheaper, and easier to produce this content—and existing harmful content can serve as the foundation to produce more"
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"Bad actors can also use generative AI tools to produce adaptable content designed to support a campaign, political agenda, or hateful position and spread that information quickly and inexpensively across many platforms."
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"In the UK, a form of initial computational propaganda has already happened during the Brexit referendum1 . In future, there are concerns that oppressive governments could use AI to shape citizens’ opinions"
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41.02.01 · Risk Sub-Category
Biased influence through citizen screening and tailored propaganda
"AI-powered chatbots tailor their communication approach to influence individual users' decisions. In the UK, a form of initial computational propaganda has already happened during the Brexit referendum. In future, there are concerns that oppressive governments could use AI to shape citizens' opinions."
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"LLM can take into account rich social context and undertake the necessary social modelling and planning for an actor to gain and exercise political influence"
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"These evaluations assess a LLM's ability to generate misinformation that can be propagated to deceive, mislead or otherwise influence the behaviour of a target (Liang et al., 2022)."
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45.02.10 · Risk Sub-Category
Safety risks in AI Applications
Cognitive risks (Risks of usage in launching cognitive warfare)
"AI can be used to make and spread fake news, images, audio, and videos; propagate content of terrorism, extremism, and organized crimes; interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, social systems, and social order; and jeopardize the sovereignty of other countries."
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"Generative AI facilitates the automation of data analysis, offering numerous benefits, such as increased speed and the ability to process large volumes of information efficiently. Such ability significantly reduces the costs of processing unprecedented amounts of data quickly and simplifies the analysis of large-scale data related to individuals’ behaviors and beliefs. Moreover, it enhances the capability to analyze both textual and visual communications efficiently. Consequently, generative AI models improve the efficiency of real-time monitoring and censorship of social media content."
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"IIl-intentioned individuals or entities may deliberately use generative AI models to produce and spread disinformation—false or misleading information knowingly presented as if true—on a massive scale. In addition to increasing the scale and reach of disinformation, generative AI can create more convincing and targeted disinformation."
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48.08.00 · Risk Category
"Lowered barrier to entry to generate and support the exchange and consumption of content which may not distinguish fact from opinion or fiction or acknowledge uncertainties, or could be leveraged for large-scale dis- and mis-information campaigns."
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49.01.02#1 · Risk Sub-Category
Disinformation and manipulation of public opinion
"AI, particularly general- purpose AI, can be maliciously used for disinformation (351), which for the purpose of this report refers to false information that was generated or spread with the deliberate intent to mislead or deceive. General- purpose AI- generated text can be indistinguishable from genuine human- generated material (352, 353), and may already be disseminated at scale on social media (354). In addition, general- purpose AI systems can be used to not only generate text but also fully synthetic or misleadingly altered images, audio, and video content. General- purpose AI tools mig
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"General purpose AI models could exacerbate existing tactics for political destabilisation, such as disinformation campaigns, and surveillance efforts if misused for political motivations. The technological advancements in text and media generation of general purpose AI models could refine disinformation164 attempts to shape and polarise public opinion or influence important political events.165 The improved automated processing of text, audio, image, and video could be used for surveillance measures and exacerbate human right violations and repression of political oppositions."
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"OpenAI’s GPT-3 was designed to be dicult to extract personal information from, including for example public gures’ dates of birth. Even so, malicious uses of AI continue to encroach on privacy, as exemplied by China’s “Sharp Eye” automated surveillance system [551] and automated cyberattacks on personal data [354]. A more drastic form of AI-enabled surveillance could be on the way in the form of nonsurgical decoding of thoughts [54]—a technique which is reportedly already used by some police forces [398]."
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55.03.03 · Risk Sub-Category
Increased power concentration and inequality
Developments in AI enable actors to undermine democratic processes
"Developments in AI are giving companies and governments more control over individuals’ lives than ever before, and may possibly be used to undermine democratic processes. We are already seeing how the collection of large amounts of personal data can be used to surveil and influence populations, for example the use of facial recognition technology to surveil Uighur and other minority populations in China [66]. Further advances in language modelling could also be used to develop tools that can effectively persuade people of certain claims [42]."
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55.04.02 · Risk Sub-Category
Worsened epistemic processes for society
AI is used to scale up production of false and misleading information
"At the same time, we are seeing how AI can be used to scale up the production of convincing yet false or misleading information online (e.g. via image, audio, and text synthesis models like BigGAN [6] and GPT-3 [7])."
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55.04.03 · Risk Sub-Category
Worsened epistemic processes for society
AI's persuasive capabilities are misused to gain influence and promote harmful ideologies
"As AI capabilities advance, they may be used to develop sophisticated persuasion tools, such as those that tailor their communication to specific users to persuade them of certain claims [42]. While these tools could be used for social good— such as New York Times’ chatbot that helps users to persuade people to get vaccinated against Covid-19 [27]—there are also many ways they could be misused by self-interested groups to gain influence and/or to promote harmful ideologies."
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"Coercion/manipulation - Use of a technology system to covertly alter user beliefs and behaviour using nudging, dark patterns and/or other opaque techniques, resulting in potential erosion of privacy, addiction, anxiety/distress, etc."
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"Electoral interference - Generation of false or misleading information that can interrupt or mislead voters and/or undermine trust in electoral processes."
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"Political manipulation - Use or misuse of personal data to target individuals’ interests, personalities and vulnerabilities with tailored political messages via micro-advertising or deepfakes/synthetic media."
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"Malicious actors can use general- purpose AI to generate fake content such as text, images, or videos, for attempts to manipulate public opinion. Researchers believe that if successful, such attempts could have several harmful consequences."
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"AI could be used to develop sophisticated tools to manipulate and persuade individuals."
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61.02.05 · Risk Sub-Category
Sources of systemic risks from general-purpose AI
AI in totalitarian regimes
"AI-based surveillance and manipulation could be used to maintain global totalitarian regimes."
Informational only, not legal advice. Verify every claim against the linked official sources and consult qualified counsel before acting.